June 2022. Lecture notes from Mario Cravallo
Whether after the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, after the failure to spread the October Revolution to Western Europe and Asia in the 1920s, or after the end of real socialism in 1989-1992: the tradition of the defeats of the revolutionary left is accompanied by a dark shadow of melancholy. Denounced, as it were, as petty-bourgeois sensibility, the disappointed hopes of the failed revolutionaries for liberation live in the melancholy, which is necessarily repressed, and yet returns after every defeat in revolutionary struggles.
This lecture first gives an overview of the history of ideas of left melancholy and tries in a second step to explain this phenomenon from an indissoluble tension between historical continuity and revolutionary rupture as a secularized eschatology in the age of the disenchantment of the world.
While preparing this, I had to admit to myself that I have composed less a scientific lecture than a kind of auditory essay, but I have left it at that now, because it is more enjoyable to listen to anyway. Maybe we can go into the scientific dimension of the whole thing in the discussion, even though there are certainly more exciting things to discuss, soccer or the weather for example.
I. Revolution and Melancholy - Passages of their History of Ideas
At the height of Stalinism, in 1938 the former top Soviet functionary and important Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin stands trial with others in a show trial in Moscow. In the so-called Third Moscow Trial, Bukharin is accused of being part of an "anti-Soviet bloc of rightists and Trotskyists." In his forced confession, he admits not only to anti-Soviet sabotage and terrorism, but also to a "defeatist orientation" reflected in "paralysis of knowledge, inhibition of reflexes" and an expression of "what in Hegel's philosophy is called unhappy consciousness." [1] Bukharin's "self-diagnosis" of his melancholy exposes him to Stalin's executioners as a counter-revolutionary agent. [2] In contrast to the heroic, determined, militant professional revolutionary who is tough on himself and others, a melancholic or depressed communist appears as anti-movement, weak and petty-bourgeois. As a result, Bukharin is sentenced to death and immediately shot.
Even though this example cites an extreme case of left history, it illustrates the hegemonic treatment within left movements of the melancholy that seizes revolutionaries when their revolutionary hopes are not fulfilled. At the same time, melancholy haunts all leftist attempts at revolution; it is often the reaction to the outcome of struggles. All great leftist attempts to overthrow the existing order included a melancholic aftertaste. It is often a result of the exhaustive work of professional revolutionaries; however, at the latest after the battle has been fought, regardless of whether it ended in victory or, more often, in defeat, it often becomes a mass phenomenon. Bini Adamczak used the example of the October Revolution to show how thousands of Bolshevik cadres, whose purpose in life had previously been their struggle as an underground cadre party against the tsarist regime, could not cope with the slow and constructive establishment of a socialist, post-revolutionary order and therefore fell into a post-revolutionary depression. [3]
Left melancholy is accordingly particularly present in the years and decades following major uprisings of the revolutionary left, most of which represent defeats in one respect or another: After the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, documented in novels and biographies by Auguste Blanqui, Jules Vallès, and Louise Michel, among others; as a reaction to the disappointed attempts to internationalize the Russian Revolution in Hungary, Bavaria, Bremen, the Ruhr, northern Italy, China; but also as a reaction to the realpolitik of the young Soviet state, which soon had little to do with the utopian ideal of many revolutionaries, as with Andrei Platonov. Melancholy was the attitude towards life of a whole generation of left-wing activists when the new, worldwide revolutionary attempt in 1968 disappointed the hopes for a revolutionary awakening that many militants of the protest movements had placed in it. In the German-language context, the most impressive descriptions of left-wing melancholy after 1968 can probably be found in the novels "Lenz" by Peter Schneider and "Heißer Sommer" as well as "ROT" by Uwe Timm. [4] Also today, leftist melancholy is still prevalent: after the final defeat of real socialism, not only morally but also materially, the significance of which is also felt by many revolutionary leftists who had positioned themselves as anti-authoritarian and in opposition to the socialist dictatorships of the Eastern bloc. [5]
Already in this brief historical outline of problems it becomes clear that melancholy represents a persistent topos of leftist politics of the past. Alongside the historical series of leftist attempts at revolution, there is a "tradition of defeats" [6], so that the history of leftist melancholy can be drawn as a displacement of these two series: Every attempt to storm the heavens is followed by a fall to earth, painful, catastrophic, and often deeply traumatic, especially at the micro level of the people who dared to fight for the whole and lost. [7] The agonizing admission of defeat and the mourning for the senseless sacrifice of the revolutionaries killed are not infrequently so overwhelming that the suppression of the suffering of defeat takes the place of grieving, and "left melancholy [...] has been concealed, repressed and sublimated" [8].
The hiddenness, buriedness of melancholy under the ruins of failed attempts at revolution is expressed in the way it is dealt with in left-wing cultural politics. Walter Benjamin, for example, polemicized against the "left melancholy" in the literature of committed left writers such as Erich Kästner; and Ernst Bloch demanded a differentiation of "what is melancholy vergaffung or else what is substantial memory in life." [9] Georg Lukács castigated the "melancholic contempt of reality."[10] In the hegemonic discourse of the leftist intelligentsia, melancholy is seen as a petty-bourgeois feeling of longing for the past, in which everything was better, while proletarian revolutionaries should direct their gaze toward the bright future of socialism. This simultaneity of contempt for melancholy and the simultaneous presence of melancholy in the lives of revolutionaries results - according to the thesis presented here - from the revolutionaries' experience of modernity, whose dialectical crystal, however, is leftist melancholy: On the one hand, no longer to expect redemption through the arrival of the Messiah, but to become - in Marx's name for the insurgents of the Paris Commune - "heaven-stormers" [11] themselves; on the other hand, through the reaction of having been driven out of paradise once again. Let us therefore turn to the conceptual history of melancholy.
II. Melancholy as Secularized Longing for the Lost Paradise
The concept of melancholy can look back on a long and complex career in Western cultural history, and with it on a prism of the most diverse ideas or meanings about its expression and essence. [12] The historical confusion of language associated with it, forms only one side of the coin, for the manifestations that have been associated with the concept of melancholy also truly form a broad field. And this already since the ancient four-sentence doctrine - after all, the manifestations of the most diverse understandings of melancholy can denote phenomena between "either pathological affection or else constitutional constitution". [13] It is therefore no wonder that melancholia cannot be clearly distinguished from related phenomena either: aecedia, melancholia, unhappy consciousness, and depression cannot be assigned to different epochs according to a teleological conceptual development, but were and are used in an overlapping manner, both in terms of content and semantics. [14]
At the beginning of the discourse on melancholy is Aristotle's famous question, "Why have all excellent men, whether philosophers, statesmen, poets, or artists, apparently been melancholics?" [15] The line drawn by Aristotle between genius and melancholy initializes two interpretations of melancholy in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Both have in common the symptomatology: "sadness and despair, since man is indeed incapable of forgetting paradise." [16] However, while some rework this longing for paradise in mimesis to divine omniscience into genius, to others it means the "sickness to death" [17], whereby certainly also the "genius melancholic [...] walks on a narrow line between two abysses" [18].
In modernity and due to the "disenchantment of the world" [19] associated with its emergence, people's relationship to melancholy also changes on different levels. First of all, it is now no longer the disturbed relationship to paradise, but precisely the "falling apart of the compromise of salvation history" between myth and history that generates "an inconsolable melancholy" [20]: because redemption has been secularized into liberation, which no longer comes into the world through messiah or apocalypse, but is the result of the action of free people beyond a metaphysical framework. If liberation then fails to materialize, melancholy about the lost future returns to people.
This change of the social discourse on melancholy is accompanied by three changes in its concept: a politicization of melancholy, a fundamentally different conception of the philosophy of history, and the emergence of mourning as a productive antidote to melancholy and a source of successful subjectivation of individuals.
In this context, the modern conception of subjectivity as a mode of single, autonomous individuals is grounded in a change in the way the dead and mourning are dealt with. In his "Lectures on Aesthetics," for example, Hegel held that the "honor and keeping of the dead is considered the first important moment for the existence of spiritual individuality." [21] He thereby situates this first moment in the funerary culture of ancient Egypt - though it is not so much the correctness of Hegel's thesis that will be discussed here, but rather that it is understood as a result of its own historical location: While other cultures burned their dead, the ancient Egyptians built mausoleums, pyramids, and other temples to bury their dead. Hereby, however, for the first time in history, "the opposition of the living and the dead emerges with power, the spiritual begins to separate itself from the unspiritual." [22] Since the dead are in this way "held as an individual and thus fortified and preserved against the notion of flowing over into the natural, into the general interweaving, washing away, and dissolution," this form of dealing with death signifies the "rising of the concrete individual spirit, which is in the process of becoming." [23] For the first time in history, the "individuality [...] is thus the principle of the independent conception of the spiritual, because the spirit is only able to exist as an individual, as a personality." [24] As he further states in the "Phenomenology", the mourning for the individual deceased also forms the basis of the community, of the social organization, since namely "[t]he dead" is for itself only "empty individuality, only a passive being for others"; the family, however, "puts its own in its place and marries the relative to the bosom of the earth" and makes him "thereby the comrade of a commonwealth, which rather overpowers and binds the forces of the individual substances and the lower vitalities, which want to become free against him and destroy him. " [25]
To Hegel, then, the emergence of subjectivity as the faculty of a single, individual personality is of the same origin as the emergence of a culture of mourning, in which the dead person is preserved as an individual and his presence as an absentee is assured by a temple or a tomb with a gravestone as a sign of his presence in life, whereby the sign, the symbol becomes the place where the dead person is kept. [26] In contrast to mourning, melancholy - as an open wound of loss, pure pain that does not allow for processing - is now understood as a proof of individual weakness, further in Hegel's words, "elevate[ing] the evils of history" to "the most terrible painting" and consequently meaning "there is nothing to be done about it," thereby selfishly occupying a place that "stands on the quiet shore and from there safely enjoying the distant sight of the tangled mass of debris." [27] In modern times, then, melancholy is increasingly transformed from a theological to a psychological-moral problem, and it is no coincidence that the most profound and, for contemporary understanding - to which this work must of course be oriented - influential concepts of melancholy are therefore found in psychoanalytic literature. The best known is certainly Freud's essay on "Mourning and Melancholy," which calls the successful detachment of libidonic energy from the lost love object mourning work, but the failure of this detachment melancholy.
Secondly, modern melancholy is the product of a reevaluation of the philosophy of history: the cyclical expectation of salvation of the Middle Ages is replaced by chronology as an infinite progress in the realization of the freedom of individuated subjects. By responding to the disappointment of the chiliastic expectations of salvation at the end of the Middle Ages, modernity still tried to banish melancholy with the mourning work of the bourgeois subject, it undertook the attempt to preserve the utopia of the lost but unforgettable paradise in the "natural progress" [28] of the enlightened bourgeois subjects to a reasonable institution of the commonwealth and to transform it as a productive processing of the loss in the mourning work. This historical optimism as secularized chiliasm no longer expected redemption through the parousia, but the liberation of people from "self-induced immaturity" [29] (Kant) through the moral action of autonomous, bourgeois subjects. This Enlightenment teleology of striving for perfection and progress is also reflected in the historical optimism of the Marxism of the Second International, according to which the crisis-riddenness of capitalism would abolish it itself, which is why social democracy had to be a only "revolutionary, but not a revolution-making party" [30] (Karl Kautsky).
But what does revolution have to do with melancholy? The bourgeois philosophy of history finds its culmination and its apex in the revolution: the free act of the unfree realizes freedom as the overcoming of the unfree past - thus it is at the same time a vanishing point as the climax of "natural progress" as well as a break with the idea of a chronological progress of history. The revolution is therefore, according to its concept, not a part of a philosophy of history, but its abolition. In this respect, thirdly, melancholy also politicizes itself in modernity. In and after the political and cultural upheavals of the early modern period, it appears as the result of the "failed attempt[s] to set a rigid system in motion" [31]: Baroque melancholy thus appears to Walter Benjamin as a reaction to the "failure of eschatology" [32] after the millenarian movements of Anabaptists, dissident clerics*, and revolutionary peasants were crushed at the beginning of the early modern period. Not coincidentally, the birth of the revolutionary workers* movement occurs out of the spirit of this "subliminal tradition [of] chiliasm." [33] But while the revolutionary thermidor, as the "fury of disappearance" [34] (Hegel), does the "work of forgetting" [35] (Mona Ozouf), melancholy is thereby the uncanny revenant of the deceased hope for a better future at the moment when the optimism of infinite progress toward freedom did not materialize. The optimism of progress of the past now presents itself as a "graveyard of unkept promises" [36] (Paul Riceur). The failure of the revolution as a breakup of historical optimism also causes a collapse of the crypt that had banished melancholy around the lost paradise within it. History no longer presents itself as a continuous stream running towards the successful revolution, but as a heap of ruins left by the lost battles, from which no light of the future shines.
Melancholy in modernity is the threefold experience of failure: failure of successful subjectivation in the form of successful processing of the experience of attachment and loss of attachment; failure of the political emancipation of the autonomous subjects thus created, and thirdly: failure of the promises of progress of bourgeois society and its optimism of history, of which the emancipated subjects should have been the actors. And where the whole is at stake, in the revolutionary struggle for the very Other, paradise on earth or the storming of heaven, the experiences of failure are particularly painful and traumatic: When revolutionaries were concerned with blowing up the ideology of "natural progress" as a "history of suffering" (Adorno); if it is about living autonomy not only as the implementation of the mute coercion of capitalism as self-mastery, but as the experience of the joy of mutual connection and the "bacchanalian frenzy," and giving life for life, then the denied eschatology, the unredeemed promise of salvation of revolutionary rebaptism, as well as the lost future of all the senseless victims of the attempts at revolution, peeks out from the ruins. The hope for revolution is therefore not - as Karl Löwith, Eric Voegelin or the terrible Hannah Arendt think - a remnant of unconquered irrationality, but rather a ferment of the lost futures of the past as unfulfilled, unrealized possibilities of freedom. And the revolutionaries, as their carriers, show themselves to be the frontiers of modernity. Yet, in the face of continuing defeat, the disappointment of chiliastic hope cannot be mourned or coped with, for, in Horkheimer's words, "The slain have truly been slain." [37]
In case this end is too frustrating, I have brought along a rather well-known poem by Brecht for motivation; I would read it out as a quick conclusion:
Der Schneider von Ulm – Legende aus der Zeit des Bauernkriegs (in "Svendborger Gedichte 1939")
(Ulm 1592)
Bischof, ich kann fliegen
Sagte der Schneider zum Bischof.
Paß auf, wie ich’s mach!
Und der stieg mit so ’nen Dingen
Die aussahn wie Schwingen
Auf das große, große Kirchendach.
Der Bischof ging weiter.
Das sind lauter so Lügen
Der Mensch ist kein Vogel
Es wird nie ein Mensch fliegen
Sagte der Bischof vom Schneider.
Der Schneider ist verschieden
Sagten die Leute dem Bischof.
Es war eine Hatz.
Seine Flügel sind zerspellet
Und er liegt zerschellet
Auf dem harten, harten Kirchenplatz.
Die Glocken sollen läuten
Es waren nichts als Lügen
Der Mensch ist kein Vogel
Es wird nie ein Mensch fliegen
Sagte der Bischof den Leuten
References
1 Bucharin, Nikolai: Letzte Worte des Angeklagten Bucharin. [1938]. In: Deborin, Abram: Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanistischen Materialismus. Frankfurt/Main 1974. S.265ff. S.278.
2 Die Denunziation der Melancholie als bürgerlich und damit konterrevolutionär war Konsens etwa in der sowjetischen Literaturpolitik: „So beschloß etwa der erste Gesamtkongress der Sowjetschriftsteller, daß es Ziel der Literatur sei, auf die Beseitigung der die Melancholie verursachenden hinzuwirken. Die Melancholie gilt als ein deutliches Merkmal bürgerlicher Dekadenz.“ (Klibansky, Raymond/Panofsky, Erwin/Saxl, Fritz: Saturn undMelancholie. Studien zur Geschichte der Naturphilosophie und Medizin, der Religion und der Kunst. Frankfurt/Main 1990. S.14)
3 Adamczak, Bini: Beziehungsweise Revolution: 1917, 1968 und kommende. Suhrkamp Verlag 2017
4 Vgl. bspw. Peitsch, Helmut: Politische Melancholie. Tropen des Marxismus um 1968. In: Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte X 4/Winter 2016. S.28 – 44; Pilzweger-Steiner, Stefanie: Männlichkeit zwischen Gefühl und Revolution: eine Emotionsgeschichte der bundesdeutschen 68er-Bewegung. Bielefeld 2015
5 Siehe hierzu bspw: Derrida, Jacques: Marx’ Gespenster. Der Staat der Schuld, die Trauerarbeit und die neue Internationale. Aus dem Französischen von Susanne Lüdemann. Frankfurt/Main 2004. Brown, Weny: Resisting Left Melancholia. In: Eng, David L./Kazanijan, David (Hrsg.).: Loss. The politics of mourning. Berkley 2003. S.458 – 465; Dean, Jodi: Communist Desire. In: Žižek, Slavoj (Hrsg.): The Idea of Communism. Band II. London 2013. S.77 – 102; Fisher, Mark: Gespenster meines Lebens. Depression, Hauntology und die verlorene Zukunft. Berlin 2015. S.35 – 39.
6 Traverso, Enzo: Linke Melancholie. Über die Stärke einer verborgenen Tradition. Aus dem Französischen von Elfriede Müller. Münster 2019. S.11.
7 Lucas, Erhard: Vom Scheitern der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Berlin 2020. Die Metapher des Himmelssturms durch die Revolution, die ein theologischen Diskurs aufruft, der im folgenden bedeutsam wird, stammt ursprünglich von Marx über die Kommunarden des aufständischen Paris 1871: Marx an Kugelmann vom 12.April 1871. In: Marx-Engels-Werke 33. S.206.
8 Traverso: Linke Melancholie. S.12.
9 Bloch, Ernst: Spuren. Werkausgabe Band I. Frankfurt/Main 1985. S.88; vgl. auch Benjamin, Walter: Linke Melancholie. Zu Erich Kästners neuem Gedichtbuch. In: ders.: Kritiken und Rezensionen. Gesammelte Schriften Band III. Herausgegeben von Hella Tiedemann-Bartels. Frankfurt/Main 1991. S.279 – 283. Selbst seine geschichtswissenschaftliche Biographie über Thomas Münzer führt Bloch mit den Wirten ein: „So blicken wir auch hier keineswegs zurück.“ (Bloch, Ernst: Thomas Münzer als Theologie der Revolution. Gesamtausgabe Band 2. Frankfurt/Main 1969. S.9.) Siehe zudem Fussnote 3.
10 Lukács, Georg: Wider dem mißverstandenen Realismus. Hamburg 1958. S.19.
11 Marx an Kugelmann vom 12.April 1871. In: Marx-Engels-Werke 33. S.206.
12 Zum Überblick über die Kulturgeschichte der Melancholie siehe insb. Klibansky, Raymond/Panofsky, Erwin/Saxl, Fritz: Saturn und Melancholie. Studien zur Geschichte der Naturphilosophie und Medizin, der Religion und der Kunst. Frankfurt/Main 1990 und Földényi, Lászlo F.: Melancholie. Aus dem Ungarischen von Nora Tahy. Berlin 2020.
13 Klibansky, Raymond/Panofsky, Erwin/Saxl, Fritz: Saturn und Melancholie. Studien zur Geschichte der Naturphilosophie und Medizin, der Religion und der Kunst. Frankfurt/Main 1990. S.51.
14 Harré, Rom/Finlay-Jones, Robert: Emotion talk across time. In: Harré, Rom (Hrsg.): The social construction of emotion. 1986. S.220 – 233.
15 Aristoteles, Problem XXX1. Zit. Nach: Klibansky, Raymond/Panofsky, Erwin/Saxl, Fritz: Saturn und Melancholie. Studien zur Geschichte der Naturphilosophie und Medizin, der Religion und der Kunst. Frankfurt/Main 1990. S.59..
16 Földényi, Lászlo F.: Melancholie. Aus dem Ungarischen von Nora Tahy. Berlin 2020. S.101.
17 Kierkegaard, Søren: Krankheit zum Tode. In: ders.: Krankheit zum Tode. Furcht und Zittern. Die Wiederholung. Der Begriff der Angst.
18 Klibansky, Raymond/Panofsky, Erwin/Saxl, Fritz: Saturn und Melancholie. Studien zur Geschichte der Naturphilosophie und Medizin, der Religion und der Kunst. Frankfurt/Main 1990. S.80. Indem die „Traurigkeit“ auch aus einer „Sehnsucht nach der Vereinigung mit Gott“ hervorgeht, erklärt sich der „melancholische[...] Selbstmorddrange[...].“ (ebd. S.181)
19 Weber, Max: Wissenschaft als Beruf (1919). In: ders.: Schriften 1894 – 1922. Ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Dirk Kaesler. Stuttgart 2002. S.474 – 513. S.488.
20 Etzold, Jörn: Die melancholische Revolution des Guy-Ernest Debord. Zürich/Berlin 2006. S.39.
21 Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II. Werke 14. Frankfurt/Main 1986. S.291.
22 Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II. Werke 14. Frankfurt/Main 1986. S.291.
23 Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II. Werke 14. Frankfurt/Main 1986. S.291.
24 Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II. Werke 14. Frankfurt/Main 1986. S.291.
25 Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich: Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke Band 3. Frankfurt/Main 1986. S.335/336
26 Vgl. Etzold, Jörn: Die melancholische Revolution des Guy-Ernest Debord. Zürich/Berlin 2006. S.33.
27 Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich: Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Werke 12. Frankfurt/Main 1986. S.34 – 35.
28 Kant, Immanuel: Kritik der reinen Vernunft. B S.338.
29 Kant, Immanuel: Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung. In: ders.: Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik. Werkausgabe XI. Herausgegeben von Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt/Main 1977. S.53 - 61. S.53.
30 Kautsky, Karl: Der Weg zur Macht. Politische Betrachtungen über das Hineinwachsen in die Revolution. (1909). Kapitel 5.
31 Lepenies, Wolf: Melancholie und Gesellschaft. Mit einer neuen Einleitung: Das Ende der Utopie und die Wiederkehr der Melancholie. Frankfurt/Main 1998. S.179.
32 Benjamin, Walter: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. In: ders.: Abhandlungen. Gesammelte Schriften Band I, 1. Hrsg. von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt/Main 1991. S.203 – 430. S.259. Vgl. für eine ähnliche Deutung auch: Debord, Guy: La Société du Spectacle. S.107. §138.
33 Thomson, Edward P.: Die Entstehung der englischen Arbeiterklasse. Erster Band. Frankfurt/Main 1987. S.52. Ähnlich: Hobsbawm: Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Century. Manchester 1959. S.60 – 61, 64. Gerd Koenen weist – die aktuelle Forschungslage zusammenfassend – in seiner Weltgeschichte des Kommunismus darauf hin, dass die spätmittelalterlichen Bauernaufstände und millenaristische Bewegungen nicht als proletarische Revolutionsversuche verstanden werden dürfen und dass ihre Führer wie Thomas Münzer eine spirituelle Erneuerung und keine säkulare protokommunistische Ordnung errichten wollten – damit hat er zwar recht, in diesem Zusammenhang aber ist es unerheblich, weil sie in der kommunistischen Geschichtspolitik etwa in den Darstellungen von Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky und Ernst Bloch und wohl auch Thomson und Hobsbawm zu solchen gemacht wurden: vgl. Koenen, Gerd: Die Farbe Rot. Ursprünge und Geschichte des Kommunismus. München 2017. S.102 – 109.
34 Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich: Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke 3. Frankfurt/Main 1986. S.436. 35 Ozouf, Mona: Thermidor, ou le travail de L’oubli. In: dies.: L’École de la Frqnce. Essais sur la Révolution, L’utopie et l’enseignement. Paris 1984. S.S.91 – 108. Übersetzung durch den Verfasser.
36 Riceur, Paul: Das Rätsel der Vergangenheit. Göttingen 1998. S.67, 128.
37 Horkheimer, Max an Benjamin, Walter vom 16.03.1937 In: Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften II. S.1332.